Jane Ian Flitman

PREMIOS EX DE ARTE ELECTRÓNICO EXPERIMENTAL

Seleccionados

Jane. Ian Flitman

Jane’ is a series of films comprising of six conversations between two men about a woman they share; both are married to a woman called Jill. Each conversation is replete with options for dialogue and camera angles that are initially randomly selected. The work also allows for user selection through navigation of the interactive master script for each selected conversation. Films last between over three minutes to a little over five.

‘Jane’ is an Angular js application with a Python Flask backend running behind a localhost nginx server and within a uwsgi application container. All media is run from local sources and does not require an internet connection to run. The host application is a Python script running a WebKit window that connects to the local server. Videos are made in real-time and stored on the local disk via ffmpeg. Storage is controlled via the automatic deletion of the generated films once they are shown.

Ian Flitman works in algorithmic narrative. Previous work incluyes Hackney Girl (2003), a self-editing video diary about the artista moving from London to Istanbul. A road movie and love story, Hackney Girl reconstitutes the act of watching film into an exercise in pattern recognition as viewers compare differently nuanced versions of the same narrative. ‘The People’ (2010) is a series of films of people listening to the poem ‘The People’ by Yeats. Users can choose the number and identity of the listeners, who they listen to, and what background music/sonic atmospherics accompany them.

Form follows function as the vagaries of desire that the mythical woman Jane embodies finds its perfect expression in the deliberately pliable text. ‘Jane’ eschews branching narrative. Instead variants that have localized polyvalence propagate semantically across neighbouring content. These maintain credible meaning in each combination of the very many compound possibilities available.